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Here is Jahmeel Spence, strolling casually around a convenience store, paying for a can of iced tea — the ho-hum errand that had brought him out of his mother-in-law’s home on an ordinary September evening. His presence was captured by surveillance cameras.

Here is Jahmeel Spence, lying dead on the ground in a laneway behind his mother-in-law’s house, surrounded by 15 bullets and ejected shell casings, and the can of iced tea that rolled away from his body. The scene was captured in photographs shot by crime scene officers.

A murder of excruciating randomness and happenstance, court has been told, killer and victim unknown to each other.

Which means nothing of consequence to his widow or two young children left without a father; it makes the loss no less profound, just more inexplicable as a tragic twist of fate.

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There is no evidence that Mark Moore had ever even clapped eyes on 27-year-old Spence before that night.

Moore, 30, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the slaying of Spence, not guilty to three other counts of first-degree murder: The deaths, within a 75-day span of Spence, Courtney Facey, Mike James and Carl Cole.

Only Cole, court heard in the Crown’s opening statement when this trial began Monday, had any history with the accused and the precise nature of that relationship hasn’t yet been revealed.

Cole was the last victim in what the prosecution has presented as the bloody spree of a serial killer.

But it began, on Sept. 10, 2010, with Spence making his way back to a family dinner celebrating his namesake son’s first day of school, a cosy gathering of relatives like so many other nights. And it should have ended as benignly as of their previous gatherings.

Shivonne Clarke is the widow. She and Spence had known each other since their teens, been a common-law couple for nearly six years, were engaged.

On Thursday, Clarke took the stand as a Crown witness.

On that autumn night, she testified, she had tried to corral the kids so they could go home around 8:30, but the children weren’t ready yet, not when Spence texted her from the store to ask if the youngsters would be staying with their grandmother overnight. That was the last communication Clarke ever had with the love of her life.

She said she remembers being in the kitchen, hearing gunshots less than an hour later, coming from behind the Greenbrae Circle townhouse. “I motioned for my children to go back into the living room.” Standing near the back door, she glanced outside the window. “I looked out. I saw a man running and shooting. He was holding what looked like a gun and sparks were coming from it.”

The man holding the gun was running left and shooting backwards down the laneway.

“We were trying to account for everybody,” Clarke testified. “I called my cousin who lives across the street to see if (Spence) was there.”

Apprehension had already started to seize her.

Spence wasn’t answering her calls or her texts. “As well as trying to look for him, I was also calling his phone, over and over.”

She and her mother stepped into the backyard. They saw a police cruiser enter the lane. “The officers got out of the car. It looked like they were looking down at something. I ran out crying.”

And that’s when she saw her husband, lifeless and bloodied. “I noticed his shoes first.” They were immediately recognizable to her, white and green. “The closer I got, I saw that it was him.”

The witness was asked by Crown attorney Sean Hickey if her fiancé had any enemies. “No.”

Pointing at the defendant, Hickey asked if she’d ever seen this man before. “No.”

Did Jahmeel Spence know this person? “No.”

And that was all. Off the stand within half an hour of stepping up onto it.

This will be a long trial but Clarke’s part in it was over. Only this she could do for a mourned heart’s treasure, continuing her existence now as a single parent to children aged only seven and eight.

Mark Moore was, as court as heard, an aspiring rapper who’d adopted the performance handle “Presidenteh” or “Prezi.” He boasted about being the baddest rapper around — only one recorded CD on his resume — but someone who “speaks what he lives . . . one of the realest out there” whose “name shakes the streets.”

If notoriety was what Moore sought, he has that now in spades. There are few defendants in the annals of local crime who’ve been indicted for quadruple first-degree murder.

On the morning after Spence was killed — the fatal shot being any of three to the head and chest — Moore allegedly texted a friend, a mentoring rapper by the name of Kevin Williams, a/k/a “Mayhem Moriarty,” bragging that he was “terrorizing the burroughs” and urging Williams to watch City Pulse news.

Police would later discover, as an officer testified Thursday, a newspaper article about Spence’s murder tucked into the drawer of a dresser stored at a locker registered to Moore.

Facey and James were killed on Sept. 29 as they sat in a car listening to music. Hickey told the jury that Williams — a witness for the prosecution — will testify that he was riding in the back seat of a BMW driven by Moore; that the defendant had pulled up alongside the other vehicle and began blasting at its occupants through the window.

Cole was felled in a hail of bullets on Nov. 24 as he stood in the parking lot of a building across the street from the very highrise where Moore himself had been shot in the face in 2001. Eyewitnesses will testify, said Hickey, to seeing a car approach Cole and the driver firing and then stepping out of the vehicle and continuing to shoot at Cole as he lay on the pavement. At autopsy, Cole was found to have 29 “gunshot-related perforations”.

Moore allegedly told a friend later that he’d “shot someone in the melon with a .45.”

Spence, Facey and James were all shot with the same 9mm semi-automatic pistol, as determined by ballistics examination.

No motive has been suggested by the prosecution for any of the murders.

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